NOTEABILITY - A COMPREHENSIVE MUSIC NOTATION EDITOR
Dr. Keith A. Hamel
U.B.C. School of Music
6361 Memorial Rd.
Vancouver, B.C.
CANADA V6T 1Z2
hamel @unixg.ubc.ca
http://debussy.music.ubc.ca/~-opus /hamel.html
Abstract
NoteAbilityTM is a comprehensive music notation editor which has been under development for
about 6 years. NoteAbility was designed to support the graphical flexibility required by
composers of contemporary music as well to provide all the standard music editing procedures
such as transposition, part extraction and page reformatting. NoteAbility is able to do this because
it includes graphical and non-graphical classes of most music images. NoteAbility is ideally
suited to the computer music community because it can represent a wide range of score types
(including complex graphical scores) and because it can be used in conjunction with many of the
music applications commonly used by composers of computer music.
1. Background
Donald Byrd [Bryd, 1986] stated that music notation editors could be categorized by the degree to which they
were Semantic-oriented versus Graphics-oriented. Those that are concerned primarily with the sematics and the
structure of music (i.e. Semantic-oriented programs) often struggle with the difficulty of including non-standard
music symbols, of representing graphical scores, and of allowing the user to contradict the conventions of Common
Music Notation (CMN). Those that are designed with a strong graphics orientation allow graphical flexibility, but
may have difficulty performing certain music editing and page formatting functions such as transposition, part
extraction and automatic wrapping of measures. Examples of programs that are Semantic-oriented are FinaleTM and
EncoreTM, and those that are graphics-oriented are NoteWriterTM [Hamel, 1989] and ScoreTM [Smith, 1973].
NoteAbilityTM [Hamel, 1997] was designed to support both models; it has a well-defined music structure and a
knowledge of the standard conventions of music notation, yet it allows a high degree of graphical flexibility and it is
easy to contradict or override the syntax of CMN.
NoteAbility was originally developed for NeXTStep computers using Objective C. It was later ported to
OpenStep and is currently being ported to Rhapsody. In addition, a scaled-down version of NoteAbility is being
written in C++ for Macintosh and Windows platforms.
2. Overview and Design Philosophy of NoteAbility
Some of NoteAbility' s design came from the fact that it was initially developed under NeXTStep; it used
display PostScript, and therefore could handle complex graphics easily and with a high degree of precision, it
supported multiple pasteboard types and inter-application messaging, and was constructed with an advanced
Graphical User Interface (GUI) which include dragging and dropping of icons, user-extensibility and on-line help.
Although most of these features are now available on other computer systems, they have been part of the NeXTStep
operating system for many years.
In terms of the overall GUI, I adopted the paradigm of a composer working on manuscript paper, so
NoteAbility provides the user with blank pages of score paper and allows the composer the flexibility and freedom
that would be available if she were working on paper; she can start anywhere on the page and enter images in any
order desired. I chose this layout because I felt that was most natural for a composer and I recognize that when you
fundamentally change the mode of interaction or the tools used to perform a task, you risk changing the results of
the task. My goal was to provide tools to assist composers doing what they already know how to do, not to alter or
restrict what they do.
3. Underlying Music Structure
In order to support both the Semantic-oriented and Graphics-oriented models, NoteAbility borrowed the notion
that exists in some graphics programs of having multiple layers. The background layer of NoteAbility consists of the
Systems, Staves, Measures, Beats and Sub-beats. This layer is always drawn first, and represents the underlying
music structure. (Of course, these images may or may not be visible, but they are present none-the-less.) A Page
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